When History and Faith Collide: Studying Jesus

Rating:
Summary: An excellent place to start.
Review: First of all, yes, this book does display some of Dr. Hedrick's biases. But, overall the book is an invaluable resource and introduction of modern Jesus scholarship. If you are a beginner in the field this book will help you hit the ground running. Do keep Dr. Hedrick's biases in mind though, and remember as his title may not suggest, he is a man of faith. Dr. Hedrick does display certain agendas, but when these are looked at in a proper manner, they will help you think critically.

Rating:
Summary: When fact and fiction collide we get a book like this
Review: When fact and fiction collide we get a book like this one. Lets start with some of the high points.

The book is well written, and I really liked the format. The author lays out each chapter with clear writing, study questions and notes at the end of each chapter, and recommending reading, which is wonderful. The fact portion of the book, namely the comparison of existing Biblical passages, is well presented and lets the reader come to their own conclusions. The author has done his homework when it comes to presenting already well known scholarly theories like the famous, but non-existent, Q documents.

However, it is when the author tries to steer the conclusions with an obvious agenda that the book quickly deteriorates into a poorly reasoned version of the Jesus Seminar theories.

The first 6 chapters are presented well as described above, but the remaining chapters are clearly written with a faulty and biased conclusion already in mind.

For example in chapter 7 in the section "Jesus Tradition" the author inexplicably jumps into theories that are widely disputed by most Biblical scholars, by trying to read into the New Testament Gospels intent that is not supported by any credible evidence. For example he states that "The evolving oral tradition made no distinction between the prophetic word of the lord and the word of the historical man". However, previously in the book he outlines and compares many of the historical sayings and finds little dissimilarity among the different reporters and even goes as far as validating the differences as what one would expect from different viewpoints of historical and factual reporting.

His over-reliance on Gnostic texts and the work of the Jesus Seminar clouds what would otherwise be a pretty good and objective layout of Biblical information.

If you are interested in a comparison of Biblical texts, and considering some interesting questions about them, this book does a decent job of that for the first two thirds. Skip the last third of the book however, as the author quickly demonstrates what happens when fact and fiction collide with poor results and illogical and biased assumptions.